Barefoot Gen is a vivid autobiographical story by artist Keiji Nakazawa who was only seven years old when the Atomic Bomb destroyed his beautiful home city of Hiroshima. The artist's manga tells the tale of one family's struggle to survive in the dreadful shadow of atomic war. (Black Moon - Art, Amine and Japanese Culture)
Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓, Hotaru no Haka) is a 1988 Japanese animated war drama film written and directed by Isao Takahata. It is an adaptation of the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka, intended as a personal apology to the author's own sister. Film critic, Roger Ebert, considers it to be one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever made. Animation historian, Ernest Rister, compares the film to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and says, "it is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen." (Wikipedia)
When the Wind Blows is an animated film originally released in the United Kingdom in 1986, based on Raymond Briggs' graphic novel of the same name. The film is a hybrid of drawn animation and stop-motion animation: the characters of Jim and Hilda Bloggs are drawn, but their home and most of the objects in it are real objects that seldom move but are animated with stop motion when they do. The soundtrack album features music by Roger Waters and David Bowie (who performed the title song), Genesis, Squeeze and Paul Hardcastle. (Wikipedia, IMDb)
American Vision: "Empire of the Signs" and "The Age of Anxiety"
by Robert Hughes
American Exceptionalism
Art critic, writer and documentary maker, Robert Hughes, explores the explosive break with the past in the seventh episode of his American Visions, "The Empire of Signs." Hughes surmises that war and the advent of the nuclear era cast a cold shadow over the American spirit while also confirming the persistent notion of American exceptionalism. With the growing irony of modern life, art and popular culture began a long, cold separation.
The 1950s, with its faith in the supremacy of American culture and its economy "swollen with production and pleasure," spawned the alienated New York school, an artistic avant garde intentionally disengaged from politics and popular culture. Jackson Pollack and his peers explored the power of the unconscious mind. On location at the museum/shrine that was Pollock's Long Island studio, Hughes points to the "holy brushes and sanctified shoes" on display.
Hughes may be permitted generational bias in his infatuated account of Pollock as the "puffy James Dean of American art" whose continuous surface paintings created a new scale, a new kind of surface and a new form of American romanticism -- an expansive "congestion of signs and scribbles," influenced by Navaho painters and evoking nothing less than the mythic space of the American West. Pollock wanted to "be nature, not just paint it," gushes Hughes, with the same wry smile of a man whose work is play and whose handling of this epic is, well, joyously playful.
Hyperbole yielded to hype in Mark Rothko's "yearning for transcendence" in his search for "timeless landscapes of color," but, Hughes concludes, the "hope that abstract art could carry the tragic weight of King Lear was bound to fail." The line between artist and critic blurred in the rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism, which was self-inflated and ultimately self-inflicting.
"Did everything abstract artists painted live up to the rhetoric about it," asks Hughes? "Of course not." And yet, despite the bombastic pretensions of Barnett Newman's "Stations of the Cross," the 1950s produced some art of great power and delight. Who cannot now admire the extraordinary versatility, inventiveness and technical skill of sculptor David Smith, whose welded steel sculptures made of carefully chosen discarded things Hughes describes as a "fusion of cubism and surrealism."
Hughes inevitably finds his way to the reigning symbol of American post-war life: Detroit's mega-monstermobiles, which he describes as the "rolling baroque public sculpture of an America gone forever." They shine amidst "rockets and chromium breasts," with "triumph, lust and aggression, and tons of room for the entire family."
Aesthetic Bookends
The idea of painting the United States flag, which Hughes calls the "most recognizable abstraction in the world," came to artist Jasper Johns in a dream. The striking anatomy of his color and the beauty and texture of his painted surfaces, applied to both flags and targets, provided the Cold War era with aesthetic bookends that are simultaneously pretty and chilling.
Johns' contemporary and friend Robert Rauschenberg broke down barriers between painting, sculpture and dance, while seeking "hopefully non-logical...juxtapositions of imagery." "You make the meaning," extolled Rauschenberg as he conceived a new form of anti-didactic, anti-dogmatic history painting; a forward looking prelude to our age with its inclusive but disabled sense of purpose.
Romare Bearden captured the energy and aesthetic of jazz with pictures inspired by Matisse, Picasso and African Art that spoke of and for the rising voice of Americans of African descent. To be white and middle class in America in the 1950s "was to have too much most of the time." And hence Hughes' essay on the glorious vulgarity of the American sandwich provides a testy and tasteless segue into the world of Claes Oldenburg, whose pop art celebrations of American food and junk is an aesthetic inspired by commonplace things.
The art of the Cold War era thus turns ideas of heroism and glamour upside down, repudiating the role of artist as celebrant. It culminates in the work of Andy Warhol, whose voyeuristic fascination with death and fame led to the glamorization of fame as an American industry, surely a long way from Frederic Church's Olana.
At last we arrive at "The Age of Anxiety" (episode eight), which portrays the art of our time as evidence of a society cut loose from its moorings. Vietnam and the assassination of President Kennedy mark the headwater of our modern malaise. And yet the art that has piled up in the 30 years since requires a sense of humor, if not an annotated scorecard, to appreciate.
The film covers the beginnings of the era of nuclear warfare, created from a broad range of archival film from the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s - including newsreel clips, television news footage, U.S. government-produced films (including military training films), advertisements, television and radio programs. News footage reflected the prevailing understandings of the media and public. Though the topic of atomic holocaust is a grave matter, the film approaches it with black humor. Much of the humor derives from the modern audience's reaction to the old training films, such as the Duck and Cover film shown in schools. (Wikipedia)
Educational Footage and Public Messages: The following clips are actual articles of public information made during the height of the Cold War in America. They are unique texts and highly appropriate for this unit in terms of their audience, purpose and context. The language used is also particularly significant playing, as it does, on the fear throughout the general public of the threat of communism and nuclear attack.
Anime
Barefoot Gen
by Keiji Nakazawa
Barefoot Gen is a vivid autobiographical story by artist Keiji Nakazawa who was only seven years old when the Atomic Bomb destroyed his beautiful home city of Hiroshima. The artist's manga tells the tale of one family's struggle to survive in the dreadful shadow of atomic war. (Black Moon - Art, Amine and Japanese Culture)
Keiji Nakazawa - Biography
http://japanfocus.org/-Keiji-Nakazawa/2638
Barefoot Gen on YouTube
1/9 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCK4arVflHE
2/9 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl4avJ5VIdg&feature=related
3/9 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awz3hCjeuqE
4/9 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oreRba3xyjU&feature=related
5/9 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL7yVkXEDDo&feature=related
6/9 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmiZQQJZ7B8&feature=related
7/9 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzs53bqWwbE&feature=related
8/ 9 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ohu3RfK32M9
9/9 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S0_EN6LCOo&feature=related
Grave of the Fireflies
by Isao Takahata
Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓, Hotaru no Haka) is a 1988 Japanese animated war drama film written and directed by Isao Takahata. It is an adaptation of the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka, intended as a personal apology to the author's own sister. Film critic, Roger Ebert, considers it to be one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever made. Animation historian, Ernest Rister, compares the film to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and says, "it is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen." (Wikipedia)
Grave of the Fireflies on YouTube
1/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSrltqaZUwE&playnext=1&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447
2/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otn5slJUX_4&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=2
3/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGJmgtHgWQM&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=3
4/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xBg3E_Vozg&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=4
5/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8hLiE2Ha3I&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=5
6/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0l_POFGoNk&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=6
7/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDyln7ilxpo&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=7
8/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BdOHkc1zwc&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=8
9/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSYH_hKwjuM&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=9
10/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2SltOAMogU&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=10
11/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU1nUOWo8rk&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=11
12/12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0ynUyUjl2M&feature=BF&list=PL554EFFE527BF9447&index=12
Animation
When the Wind Blows
When the Wind Blows is an animated film originally released in the United Kingdom in 1986, based on Raymond Briggs' graphic novel of the same name. The film is a hybrid of drawn animation and stop-motion animation: the characters of Jim and Hilda Bloggs are drawn, but their home and most of the objects in it are real objects that seldom move but are animated with stop motion when they do. The soundtrack album features music by Roger Waters and David Bowie (who performed the title song), Genesis, Squeeze and Paul Hardcastle. (Wikipedia, IMDb)
On YouTube at:
1/8 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EbsrJuAoQo
2/8 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cOpBGM-0Nc&feature=related
3/8 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtVEblvYzk4&feature=related
4/8 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1PFEVayxxA&feature=related
5/8 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cDox-suQaM&feature=related
6/8 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drJDwJ0VN4U&feature=related
7/8 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8OcC_VfTfY&feature=related
8/8 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDVFzpAjGb8&feature=related
Documentary
American Vision:
"Empire of the Signs" and "The Age of Anxiety"
by Robert Hughes
American Exceptionalism
Art critic, writer and documentary maker, Robert Hughes, explores the explosive break with the past in the seventh episode of his American Visions, "The Empire of Signs." Hughes surmises that war and the advent of the nuclear era cast a cold shadow over the American spirit while also confirming the persistent notion of American exceptionalism. With the growing irony of modern life, art and popular culture began a long, cold separation.
The 1950s, with its faith in the supremacy of American culture and its economy "swollen with production and pleasure," spawned the alienated New York school, an artistic avant garde intentionally disengaged from politics and popular culture. Jackson Pollack and his peers explored the power of the unconscious mind. On location at the museum/shrine that was Pollock's Long Island studio, Hughes points to the "holy brushes and sanctified shoes" on display.
Hughes may be permitted generational bias in his infatuated account of Pollock as the "puffy James Dean of American art" whose continuous surface paintings created a new scale, a new kind of surface and a new form of American romanticism -- an expansive "congestion of signs and scribbles," influenced by Navaho painters and evoking nothing less than the mythic space of the American West. Pollock wanted to "be nature, not just paint it," gushes Hughes, with the same wry smile of a man whose work is play and whose handling of this epic is, well, joyously playful.
Hyperbole yielded to hype in Mark Rothko's "yearning for transcendence" in his search for "timeless landscapes of color," but, Hughes concludes, the "hope that abstract art could carry the tragic weight of King Lear was bound to fail." The line between artist and critic blurred in the rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism, which was self-inflated and ultimately self-inflicting.
"Did everything abstract artists painted live up to the rhetoric about it," asks Hughes? "Of course not." And yet, despite the bombastic pretensions of Barnett Newman's "Stations of the Cross," the 1950s produced some art of great power and delight. Who cannot now admire the extraordinary versatility, inventiveness and technical skill of sculptor David Smith, whose welded steel sculptures made of carefully chosen discarded things Hughes describes as a "fusion of cubism and surrealism."
Hughes inevitably finds his way to the reigning symbol of American post-war life: Detroit's mega-monstermobiles, which he describes as the "rolling baroque public sculpture of an America gone forever." They shine amidst "rockets and chromium breasts," with "triumph, lust and aggression, and tons of room for the entire family."
Aesthetic Bookends
The idea of painting the United States flag, which Hughes calls the "most recognizable abstraction in the world," came to artist Jasper Johns in a dream. The striking anatomy of his color and the beauty and texture of his painted surfaces, applied to both flags and targets, provided the Cold War era with aesthetic bookends that are simultaneously pretty and chilling.
Johns' contemporary and friend Robert Rauschenberg broke down barriers between painting, sculpture and dance, while seeking "hopefully non-logical...juxtapositions of imagery." "You make the meaning," extolled Rauschenberg as he conceived a new form of anti-didactic, anti-dogmatic history painting; a forward looking prelude to our age with its inclusive but disabled sense of purpose.
Romare Bearden captured the energy and aesthetic of jazz with pictures inspired by Matisse, Picasso and African Art that spoke of and for the rising voice of Americans of African descent. To be white and middle class in America in the 1950s "was to have too much most of the time." And hence Hughes' essay on the glorious vulgarity of the American sandwich provides a testy and tasteless segue into the world of Claes Oldenburg, whose pop art celebrations of American food and junk is an aesthetic inspired by commonplace things.
The art of the Cold War era thus turns ideas of heroism and glamour upside down, repudiating the role of artist as celebrant. It culminates in the work of Andy Warhol, whose voyeuristic fascination with death and fame led to the glamorization of fame as an American industry, surely a long way from Frederic Church's Olana.
At last we arrive at "The Age of Anxiety" (episode eight), which portrays the art of our time as evidence of a society cut loose from its moorings. Vietnam and the assassination of President Kennedy mark the headwater of our modern malaise. And yet the art that has piled up in the 30 years since requires a sense of humor, if not an annotated scorecard, to appreciate.
Given that Robert Hughes earned a big part of his reputation by deflating the inflated rhetoric of the contemporary art scene, his observations are hardly objective. Indeed, few aspects of this series are, which is why I suspect that viewers who tune in for the opening episode will hang on to the end. This op-ed piece as home entertainment is hard to resist.See them on YouTube:
American Visions - Empire of the Signs (Robert Hughes)
1/5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1arL-L7_O4
2/5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI-BjmNoxdk&feature=related
3/5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey24sWxcmc4&feature=related
4/5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f13FC95zvY&feature=related
5/5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14HFM3sucRE&feature=related
American Visions – The Age of Anxiety
1/5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1zJrpAvVJo&feature=related
2/5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgelc5BVQrk&feature=related
3/5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ta9mnld5H4&feature=related
4/5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-imUiYqybc&feature=related
5/5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjJtu29EQwM&feature=related
The Atomic Café
The film covers the beginnings of the era of nuclear warfare, created from a broad range of archival film from the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s - including newsreel clips, television news footage, U.S. government-produced films (including military training films), advertisements, television and radio programs. News footage reflected the prevailing understandings of the media and public.
Though the topic of atomic holocaust is a grave matter, the film approaches it with black humor. Much of the humor derives from the modern audience's reaction to the old training films, such as the Duck and Cover film shown in schools. (Wikipedia)
On YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOUtZOqgSG8
Educational Footage and Public Messages:
The following clips are actual articles of public information made during the height of the Cold War in America. They are unique texts and highly appropriate for this unit in terms of their audience, purpose and context. The language used is also particularly significant playing, as it does, on the fear throughout the general public of the threat of communism and nuclear attack.
Duck and Cover : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xLMpd_iZvc
Survival Under Attack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8SK28htqbg&feature=fvwrel
What is Communism?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wccIqjrGGMk&feature=related
Photographic Exhibition:
Nagasaki Journey – Yosuke Yamahata
http://www.exploratorium.edu/nagasaki/photos.html#journey/01.gif